AU is Going Virtual

AU is going virtual as part of our on-going efforts to increase the reliability of IT services while minimizing costs.

Virtualization is becoming more and more popular across educational institutions as an excellent way to not only get more for less, but to also provide highly reliable systems. The cost benefit of virtualization is simple. Typical servers are underutilized, and most servers sit idle for large parts of the day. By consolidating several servers onto fewer pieces of hardware, we can get higher utilization from the hardware while reducing power, cooling, and space requirements within our data center.

Virtualization can actually provide a higher level of reliability for our server environment, as well as supporting our "Green" initiatives and saving the university money. This is because once the servers become "virtual", they also become portable and detached from physical hardware. This allows us to move them between physical devices to perform maintenance on hardware without taking the server resources off-line. This technology will not only reduce our unscheduled downtime, but will eventually help to reduce our scheduled maintenance windows as well.

We are proud to announce that our first virtual servers have come on line, with many more to come over time.